04.28.07

Some things are too obvious be ignored. Novell continues to woo Red Hat system administrators and engineers. This is not the first time that the rivalry between the two companies is made appparent by such articles and press releases. They usually come from Novell’s direction, but not the other way around.

Novell South Africa in association with SmartSource (Novell’s locally-appointed training partner) has announced the local release of the ‘Migrating from Red Hat to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10’ training course…

One might ask, why does Novell not reach out to Windows developers? They can probably get them to ‘switch camps’ amidst this wonderful cusp of adoption. That’s where the answer gets tricky and bizarre. If you enter Novell’s Linux realm, you may as well familiarise yourself with .NET and some related Microsoft-esque skills. Novell’s new strategy shows that the company is determinded to boost the use of Mono. As we have explained before, this leads to a plethora of serious legal and technical barriers.

Mainsoft announced the winners of the “Race to Linux 2.0.” Jointly sponsored by Mainsoft, IBM, and Novell, the Race to Linux 2.0 challenged .NET developers to take three open-source ASP.NET 2.0 applications from Windows to Linux using their cross-platform tool of choice (e.g. Mono, Mainsoft’s Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview, PHP, or Ruby).

A Canadian software developer has won an international programming competition aimed at changing perceptions about the challenge of porting .Net applications to Linux.

This is truly an achievement for enterprises that migrate from Windows to Linux, but shouldn’t an open language (not encumbered by patents) be encouraged?